##CHAPTER XIX
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS AND LORD W. BENTINCK (1815–1835)
THE opinions recorded by men like Sir Henry Strachey, Colonel Munro, and Colonel Walker, the famous Fifth Report submitted by the Select Committee of the House of Commons of 1812, and lastly, the evidence given by Munro and Malcolm before the House of Commons in 1813, had their effect on public opinion in England, and compelled the Court of Directors to take some measures to reform the judicial administration of India. They appointed a Special Commission to inquire into and reform the judicial system, and Colonel Munro was appointed President of the Commission.
Munro left England in June 1814, and arrived at Madras in September, after a quick voyage of eighteen weeks. Without any loss of time he entered into his work with his accustomed ardour, and on Christmas Eve of the same year he placed before the Government of Madras his suggestions under six heads. He proposed (1) that the Collector should be vested with the authority of Magistrate, and the management of the village police should be restored to the heads of villages; (2) that Village Panchayats should be reconstructed; (3) that Native District Judges or Commissioners should be appointed; (4) that Collectors should be empowered to enforce Pottah Regulations; (5) that the power of Zemindars to distrain should be restricted; and (6) that cases of disputed boundaries should be decided by Collectors. ¹
It is impossible not to remark in these preliminary suggestions two predominating ideas which actuated Thomas Munro. In the first place, he insisted on placing all judicial work, as far as possible, in the hands of the people of India, appointed as Village Heads, District Judges, and Commissioners. In the second place, he desired to centralize all executive power—revenue, magisterial, and police—in the hands of a single official, the District Collector. His first idea has only been partially carried into execution, and the post of District Judge is, to the present time, virtually reserved for Europeans. His second idea, probably justified in an age of disorder and misrule, has unfortunately been acted upon down to the present time.
It is impossible within our limits to narrate the work of the Commission during the subsequent two years, and the vast amount of correspondence which ensued, and which fill nearly 500 folio pages of the East India Papers. ² It is enough to state that the Commission at first prepared drafts of seven Regulations and submitted them to the Chief Civil and Criminal Courts of Madras for revision. A letter from the Court of Directors, dated 20th December 1815, was then received and forwarded to the Commission. Various alterations and additions to the original drafts were made in accordance with the suggestions of the Madras Government and of the Chief Courts. Finally a series of Fifteen Regulations were passed at different dates in 1816.
The immediate result of these Regulations was to largely extend the employment of the people of Madras in responsible posts, and the transference of much of the judicial work to their hands. It was a reform which the most thoughtful of the Company’s servants had advocated for years past, a reform which was needed in the interests of good administration. It fell to Thomas Munro to be the first to give effect to this needed reform.
“The most important and laborious part of that duty,” wrote the Court of Directors to the Government of Madras, “fell on Colonel Munro, the first Commissioner, in whose commendation it would be superfluous for us to speak, were it not for the purpose of assuring you, for your information and that of the Civil Service in general, that we consider the services which he has rendered to the Company and to the natives, as Chief of the Commission, to be as deserving of our hearty acknowledgments as any act of his long and honourable public life.”
This encomium was well deserved, and has been endorsed by public opinion in India. Nevertheless, it is necessary to state that some of the objects aimed at by Munro in his Regulations have not been fulfilled. The endeavour to place the village police under village heads has been abandoned, and the Police now forms a separate force all over India. And the endeavour to reconstruct village Panchyets has also failed, for reasons which have been explained elsewhere. The time to construct Village Unions under wiser regulations has now come, and the Government in India will never be in touch with the mass of the people till this is effected.
On the other hand, the mistake made by Thomas Munro in combining the duties of the Collector, the Magistrate, and the Police, in the same hands has been perpetuated. The mistake was committed, not without a strong protest from the Madras Government, even in 1815 and 1816. Mr. Fullerton, a Member of the Madras Government, stated the cardinal objections to that combination of duties fully and clearly.
“The transfer of Magisterial duties to Collectors also, I do certainly think must involve a departure that may go far to counteract the benefit of the judicial system, by arming the executive with too much power, and lessening that faith and confidence the people now begin to feel in the protection of the Judicial Department.“¹
The Madras Government was of the same opinion, and held that while the Collector might be vested with the superintendence of the Police, he should not be armed with magisterial powers. The question went up to the Court of Directors, and the Directors overruled the Madras Government, and directed the combination of revenue and magisterial duties in the same officers.
“The point on which a difference of sentiment has arisen between you and Colonel Munro regards that part of our despatch in which we enjoined the transfer of magisterial functions to the Collector, Colonel Munro thinking that we meant to include in the transfer not merely the superintendence and control of the police, but the whole duties of magistrate, and our Governor in Council, on the other hand, conceiving that we intended to confine the transfer to the superintendence and control of the police establishment.
“We have no hesitation in declaring our intention to have been that the transfer should take place in the sense and to the extent supposed by Colonel Munro.“²
The Government of Madras submitted to this decision with ill-grace. Robert Fullerton wrote again: “However much I must lament that the sentiments I had previously recorded should have proved at variance with the orders and opinions since received from superior authority, I cannot conscientiously recall them. Intermediate reflection, and the consideration of various public documents since received, have added strength to the belief that the whole and sole magisterial authority of the district, vested in the Collector, much of which must be delegated to Native Revenue officers, uncontrolled except by the occasional visits of the Judge of Circuit, will establish a degree of power in the Revenue Department, against the abuse of which no legal appeal can effectually be made.” 1
We now turn to the affairs of Bombay. No reference to Bombay has been made in preceding chapters, because the greater portion of the Province came under British Rule more than half a century after Bengal and Madras. British influence was firmly established in Bengal after the battle of Plassey in 1757, and in Madras after the battle of Wandewash in 1761, but the Mahrattas held their own in the west of India in spite of the wars of Warren Hastings and Lord Wellesley. The last of the Peshwas was seated on the throne of Poona by the help of British arms in 1802, and maintained a British subsidiary force within his dominions by the terms of his treaty with the British. This was the beginning of the end. He soon discovered the formidable power of his new allies, and chafed under the restraint he had placed on himself. At last he threw off the mask; he fought one battle and lost, and his dominions were annexed to British territory in 1817.
Mountstuart Elphinstone’s name is as intimately connected with the building up of British administration in Bombay as the name of Thomas Munro is connected with Madras. Elphinstone went out to India in 1796, a young lad of seventeen. Seven years after he had the good fortune of serving in the capacity of a private secretary under Arthur Wellesley, afterwards the famous Duke of Wellington. He rode by the Duke’s side in the great battle of Assaye in 1803, and he first acquired his intimate knowledge of Mahratta affairs and administration as Resident at Nagpur from 1804 to 1808. A mission to Kabul enabled him to write a very readable work on the people and institutions of that unknown country, and on his return he was, in 1811, appointed Resident at Poona, where he was destined to play an important part in the revolution which followed within a few years. The revolution came, as stated before, in 1817; the rule of Baji Rao, the last Peshwa, was swept away; and the Deccan was annexed to the British Empire.
Elphinstone’s unequalled experience in Mahratta affairs marked him out as the most capable man for settling the conquered territory. He was appointed Commissioner of the Deccan in January 1818, and the work performed by him in this capacity will be referred to in the following chapter. In 1819 he was appointed Governor of Bombay, and during the eight years that he held this high appointment, he laid the foundations of British administration in Western India.
His fame as a liberal administrator rests mainly on his work in three directions. His first endeavour was to codify the law. His second great object was to confer on the people of India as large a share in the work of administration as was then possible. His third and last purpose was to spread a sound education among the people, so as to enable them to take a higher and more responsible share in the future in the management of their own concerns.
The first task was well and satisfactorily done. “The whole of the Bombay Regulations were formed into a code, regularly arranged according to their subject matter. This code consists of twenty-seven Regulations, subdivided into chapters and sections. It refers to the same subjects as the Bengal Regulations, but differs from them in the circumstance that it contains a body of substantial criminal law.” ¹ Beyond this, Elphinstone endeavoured to prepare a digest of the laws, customs, and usages of the people themselves. “What we call Hindu law,” he wrote, “applies to Brahmans only; each caste has separate laws and customs;” and Elphinstone’s idea was to compile a complete digest of these varying customs of all castes and tribes. Such an idea was worthy of him, but was impossible of execution, and the work remained unaccomplished.
How intimate the best administrators in India have always been with the highest thought and culture of England will appear from the fact that while Elphinstone was seeking to compile a digest of Hindu usages and laws, he was studiously applying himself to the works of Jeremy Bentham. He wrote of him to Strachey:
“I was greatly delighted with your account of Jeremy Bentham. I had a great curiosity about him, which was fully gratified. He is certainly a man of first-rate talents, but also of first-rate eccentricity, which, both in his doctrines and his personal habits, probably arises from his little intercourse with the world. I was extremely flattered by his present of books, and knew no author from whom I should so highly have valued such a distinction. When I last wrote to you at length, I was thinking of employing the Bengal counsellors whom I expected to get at Poona to form a code from the Hindoo law as administered under the Brahmans and the customs of the Mahratta country, corrected in some cases by our own; but I got no counsellors, and the more I contemplated the undertaking the more formidable it seemed.”1
Historians of India have not always made it sufficiently clear that British administration in India during the last 150 years has been always shaped by European influences. The wars of Frederick the Great fostered those wars between the English and the French in the eighteenth century which ended in the effacement of the latter in India; and the Napoleonic wars inspired the ambitious conquests of Lord Wellesley and Lord Hastings. The endeavour after judicial, civil, and domestic reforms which followed, and which culminated in England in the Reform Act of 1832, led to similar reforms in India, and admitted the people into a larger share of administrative work in Madras, Bombay, and Bengal. And during the seventy years which have elapsed since, every period of peace and reforms in England has been marked by some tangible reforms in India; and every wave of the war feeling in England has inspired ambitious projects and often foolish wars in India. The want of any popular representation in India makes that country dependent on England in more senses than one; and the people of India have often had to endure unwise and retrograde administration, and to pay for unwise and foolish wars, during periods of England’s temporary madness!
At the period of which we are speaking in this chapter the English influences were of the healthiest kind, and induced Munro, Elphinstone, and Bentinck not only to reform the laws of India, but to regard favourably the claims of the people to a legitimate share in the administration. Elphinstone was as thorough in this opinion as Munro, and gave expression to it in all his correspondence and minutes in which the question came up for consideration. The following extract from a letter to Sir Thomas Munro, dated 1822, will serve as an example:
“I hear you have instituted something like a Native Board at Madras, and I should be much obliged if you would inform me of the nature of the plan. It seems to be one great advantage of the arrangement that it opens a door to the employment of natives in high and efficient situations. I should be happy to know if you think the plan can be extended to the judicial or any other line. Besides the necessity for having good native advisers in governing natives, it is necessary that we should pave the way for the introduction of the natives to some share in the government of their own country. It may be half a century before we are obliged to do so; but the system of government and of education which we have already established must some time or other work such a change in the people of this country that it will be impossible to confine them to subordinate employment; and if we have not previously opened vents for their ambition and ability, we may expect an explosion which will overturn our Government.”
Four years later, in a letter to Henry Ellis, Elphinstone expressed his matured opinion on the subject still more emphatically.
“It has always been a favourite notion of mine that our object ought to be to place ourselves in the same relation to the natives as the Tartars are in to the Chinese: retaining the government and military power, but gradually relinquishing all share in the civil administration, except that degree of control which is necessary to give the whole an impulse and direction. This operation must be so gradual that it need not even alarm the Directors, as you suppose, for their civil patronage; but it ought to be kept in mind, and all our measures ought to tend to that object.” 1
Elphinstone always upheld and preached this idea to the end of his life. Over twenty years after his retirement from India, when he was living a retired life among his books in his quiet country house at Surrey—esteemed by all as the highest authority on Indian affairs, and pressed more than once to go out to India as Governor General—he still entertained and expressed the same opinion in his correspondence.
“We . . . must apply ourselves to bring the natives into a state that will admit of their governing themselves in a manner that may be beneficial to our interest as well as their own and that of the rest of the world, and to take the glory of the achievement and the sense of having done our duty for the chief reward of our exertions.” 2
It remains to add that Elphinstone did all he could to give effect to this policy during his administration; and the example set in Madras by Sir Thomas Munro enabled him to place a large share of the judicial work of Bombay in the hands of Indian Civil Judges of different grades.
The third and last great object of Elphinstone’s administration was the promotion of education among the people. Bombay was then probably the most backward of all the Presidencies in point of education. The chaplains of the East India Company supervised a few charity schools, and missionary effort was almost confined to a small body of American missionaries who came to Bombay in 1814.
Elphinstone presided at a public meeting in 1820, and a Society for the promotion of the Education of the Poor was formed. He obtained a grant of £5000 for this Society for printing works and purchasing prizes, and all education in the vernacular languages was conducted during the next sixteen years through the agency of this Society, Elaborate inquiries were also conducted into the system of primary instruction, and the result of these inquiries, published in 1832, disclosed a total of 1705 schools with 35,143 scholars in the Bombay Province, with its populatian of nearly five millions.¹
In his endeavour to spread higher education, Elphinstone met with opposition from his own Council, and also from the Court of Directors. Elphinstone desired to found a College at Bombay for young civilians with a special department for the training of native officials; the latter part of the scheme was opposed by his Council; and the whole project failed to obtain the sanction of the Directors.
For the spread of general education Elphinstone proposed (1) to improve and increase the native schools; (2) to supply them with schoolbooks; (3) to encourage the lower classes to obtain education; (4) to establish new schools for the teaching of European sciences; (5) to prepare books of moral and physical science in the vernaculars; (6) to establish new schools for teaching English; (7) to hold forth encouragement to the people. To conciliate the Directors, Elphinstone pointed out that the cost of the schools to the Company would be small, and would be largely borne by villages. Nevertheless no sanction to his scheme was received before he left India. The first English school was opened in Bombay in 1828, the year after Elphinstone’s departure; an English department was attached to the Sanscrit college at Poona in the same year; and the great Elphinstone Institution of Bombay was not opened till 1834.
We conclude this brief account of Elphinstone’s educational work in India by making one or two extracts from his Minutes of 1824.
“It has been urged against our Indian Government that we have subverted the States of the East, and shut up all the sources from which the magnificence of the country was derived, and that we have not ourselves constructed a single work, either of utility or of splendour. It may be alleged with more justice that we have dried up the fountains of native talent, and that from the nature of our conquest, not only all encouragement to the advancement of knowledge is withdrawn, but even the actual learning of the nation is likely to be lost and the productions of former genius to be forgotten. Something should surely be done to remove this reproach.”¹
And he wrote in the same year :
“If care were taken to qualify the natives for the public service, and afterwards to encourage their employment, the picture would be soon reversed. At no very distant day we might see natives engaged in superintending a portion of a District as the European Assistants are doing now. In a more advanced stage, they might sometimes be Registrars and Sub-Collectors, or even Collectors and Judges; and it may not be too visionary to suppose a period at which they might bear to the English nearly the relation which the Chinese do to the Tartars, the Europeans retaining the government and the military power, while the natives filled a large portion of the civil stations, and many of the subordinate employments in the army.” ¹
The two greatest administrators of their time were removed from India in the same year. Sir Thomas Munro died in July 1827, and Mountstuart Elphinstone left India four months after. In the same year Lord William Bentinck was appointed Governor-General of India, and it fell to him to complete the work which Munro and Elphinstone had so happily begun.
No administrator went out to India under stronger influences of that healthy public opinion which was forming itself in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. He had been Governor of Madras early in the nineteenth century, had been removed from the post on the occurrence of a mutiny, and had then plunged into European politics. He was in Sicily and in Italy, planning with the Duke of Orleans (afterwards Louis Philippe, King of France) for the emancipation of Italy; and after the capture of Genoa in 1814, he restored to the Genoese their old constitution, and called on the Italians to struggle and be a free nation. The victorious Allies, however, wanted to keep up the old order of things, and the Congress of Vienna forced Italy under the hated rule of Austria. Thirteen years after this, when France was on the eve of the revolution of 1830, when England was already agitating for a Reform Act, Lord William Bentinck arrived in India as Governor-General in 1828.
The administrative and educational reforms effected by Lord William Bentinck were on the lines laid down by Munro and Elphinstone. A larger share of judicial work was given to qualified Indian officials, and a higher grade of Indian judges was created under the name of Sudder Ameens. Some executive and revenue work was also entrusted to them, and a higher grade was created for them under the name of Deputy Collectors. During a period of over seventy years, the educated people of India have proved their ability, integrity, and fitness for the most difficult and responsible administrative work.
The Land Settlements of 1822 in Northern India, under which the State claimed more than three-fourths of the rental as the Land Tax, had proved oppressive in the extreme. Lord William Bentinck changed the system, and reduced the State demand to two-thirds of the rental. A new settlement commenced in 1833, and effected by R. M. Bird, gave much relief to the people, while it actually increased the revenue from the soil. We shall speak of this new settlement in a subsequent chapter.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the most advanced among the educated Hindus, gave the Governor-General his support in abolishing that cruel custom of permitting Hindu widows to burn themselves on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands, known under the name of Sati. And Sleeman’s name stands prominent in connection with the suppression of the class of criminals known as Thugs or wayside murderers, who infested various parts of India.
The Company’s Charter was renewed in 1833, and the Company’s trade was abolished. They stood forth henceforward as administrators of India, not as traders; and they found in Lord William Bentinck the most efficient helper in the cause of good administration. The post of a Legal Member of the Governor General’s Council was created, and the illustrious Macaulay went out to India as the first Legal Member.
Never had any Governor-General more enthusiastic colleagues. Trevelyan, as has been stated in the preceding chapter, took the first decisive step in abolishing the Inland Duties which had so long impeded trade in India. Macaulay helped in all legal work, and made the first draft of that celebrated Penal Code of India which is still one of the finest penal laws in the world. And Metcalfe followed out Lord William’s policy after his retirement, and granted liberty to the Press of India during his short administration.
True reforms always lead to retrenchment, and Lord William Bentinck changed the chronic deficit in the Indian budget into a surplus. The total deficit during fifteen years, from 1814 to 1828, was nearly twenty millions sterling, while the deficit during the last six years of this period amounted to nearly three millions a year. Lord William Bentinck’s administration changed this into a surplus of two millions.
No true reformer in Indian administration has escaped obloquy and censure. The extension of the civil powers of the Indian officials gave offence to the Europeans in India; and the Act which withdrew from them their privilege of bringing civil appeals before the Supreme Court at Calcutta was called the Black Act, and brought upon Macaulay and Lord William Bentinck a torrent of abuse.¹ The historian Thornton was himself carried away by this race prejudice, and wrote of Bentinck that he “added the treachery of the Italian to the caution of the Dutchman.” Such is the fate which has overtaken, not once or twice, those British administrators who have laboured to work in the interests of the unrepresented people. Canning and Ripon are more recent instances.
English education had made more progress in Calcutta than in Bombay. David Hare, a watchmaker of Calcutta, started an English school, and his name is remembered in Bengal to this day as the Father of English education. Subsequently, in 1817, the Marquis of Hastings founded the Hindu College of Calcutta. The question soon arose whether education should be imparted in India through the English language, or through the Sanscrit and Arabic and the vernacular languages of India. Oriental scholars, with a generous appreciation of all that was great and noble in the Oriental classics, urged that education should be imparted to the people through their own language. But more practical men, like Macaulay and Trevelyan, thought that no true education in modern knowledge and sciences could be imparted except through the medium of a modern language. Macaulay’s masterly Minute, which has become a historical document, virtually decided the controversy. With a very imperfect appreciation of Sanscrit literature, he nevertheless came to a conclusion which was correct—that modern education could only be imparted through a modern language.
“Suppose that the Pasha of Egypt, a country once superior in knowledge to the nations of Europe, but now sunk far below them, were to appropriate a sum for the purpose of reviving and promoting literature, and encouraging learned natives of Egypt, would anybody infer that he meant the youth of his Pashalic to give years to the study of hieroglyphics, to search into all the doctrines disguised under the fables of Osiris, and to ascertain with all possible accuracy the ritual with which cats and onions were anciently adored? Would he be justly charged with inconsistency if, instead of employing his young subjects in deciphering obelisks, he were to order them to be instructed in the English and French languages, and in all the sciences to which those languages are the chief keys?…
“ We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue. We must teach them some foreign tongue. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West…. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia, communities which are every day becoming more important and more closely connected with our Indian Empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be most useful to our native subjects.”¹
The Orientalists were routed by the irresistible logic and the matchless power of Macaulay’s Minute. It was decided that education should be imparted to the people of India through the medium of the English language. Nineteen years after, this decision was supplemented by the famous Education Despatch of 1854, which provided that primary education should be imparted in Indian schools through the Indian vernaculars, and should lead up to higher education in English. This is the educational policy of India to the present day.
On the 20th March 1835, Lord William Bentinck left India after a benevolent and successful rule of seven years. In the graphic words of Macaulay, inscribed on the pedestal of Bentinck’s statue in Calcutta, he “never forgot that the end of government is the happiness of the governed.”
After his retirement from India, Lord William Bentinck was elected Member of Parliament in the Liberal interest for the city of Glasgow in 1837; but he spent a good deal of his time in France, where his friend Louis Philippe was then king, and he died in Paris in June 1839. The calumnies and censure with which privileged classes had assailed him in India passed away; and fourteen years after his death, Sir Charles Trevelyan, who had been his colleague in India, spoke of Bentinck’s administration in his evidence before the Lords’ Committee in words which have received universal assent from the people of India.
“I must bear my testimony to Lord William Bentinck, that although the honour of having established our dominion in India belongs to others, to Lord William Bentinck belongs the great praise of having placed our dominion in India on its proper foundation in the recognition of the great principle that India is to be governed for the benefit of the Indians, and that the advantages which we derive from it should only be such as are incidental and inferential from that course of proceeding.” 1
There is no doubt that men like Munro, Elphinstone, and Bentinck, Trevelyan, Metcalfe, and Macaulay, set this high ideal before them in their administration of India; and if it had been possible for one nation to work in the interests of another, India to-day would have been governed “for the benefit of the Indians.” But it is not in human nature for one race to work for another; and it were idle to ignore the fact that all Indian interests, commercial, industrial, economic, and financial, have been subordinated to the interests of England down to the present time. Mankind has yet discovered no method of ruling a subject nation for the benefit of that nation except by conceding to them some hand in the administration of their own concerns, some degree of representation and self-government. And until this policy is adopted in India, the words that “India is to be governed for the benefit of the Indians” will remain an idle maxim, if not a cruel satire.
Footnotes
¹ Colonel Munro to the Madras Government, Letter dated 24th December 1814, para. 6.
² Vol. ii. (1820), pp. 291-769.
¹ Minute, dated 1st January 1816.
² Judicial Letter from the Court of Directors to the Government of Madras, dated 20th December 1815, paras. 12 and 13.
¹ Sir James Stephen. Proceedings of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science for 1872-73.
¹ J. S. Cotton’s Mountstuart Elphinstone and the Making of South-Western India, 1896, p. 193.
¹ Quoted in J. S. Cotton’s work, cited before.
¹ Macaulay refers to this European agitation in these words: “That Public Opinion means the opinion of five hundred persons who have no interest, feeling, or taste in common with the fifty millions among whom they live; that the Love of Liberty means the strong objection which the five hundred feel to every measure which can prevent them from acting as they choose towards the fifty millions."—Trevelyan’s Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay.
¹ Macaulay’s Minute, dated 2nd February 1835.